Western Digital My Book Studio Edition II – high speed high capacity storage for the creative pro in you

This external hard drive is directed at creative professionals and video editors who need a lot of fast storage space so they can do their work. This drive can certainly provide it and won’t be slowed by the interface by which it connects to your computer either since it has four of them.

You get your choice of one or two terabytes of storage which is set up in RAID 0 striped, allowing you to reach the high read and write speeds you desire. Interface wise you get your choice of FireWire 400, FireWire 800, eSATA, and USB 2.0, the eSATA obviously being the fastest, but not supported on many Macs, so FireWire 800 being the next best option.

This drive is also green, not in the sense of color, but in respect to the third of power that it uses compared to other comparable drives and the fact that it has a power-save mode. My favorite parts are the LED capacity gauge and the fact that its user serviceable, meaning you can crack it open and replace the drives if they ever go bad.

One downside of striping RAID 0 though is that if one drive goes down, you lose everything, so a backup of the contents of this drive would definitely be a good idea, however, it will also make this drive operate extremely fast. Both the one and two terabyte models are available now with the 2TB model costing $599. Also, should you want one for your Windows Machine, it can be reformatted for that purpose as well.